Developing Java Applications with Eclipse

Eclipse is a universal IDE (a general purpose development environment). Eclipse is an open source platform for building applications. A variety of plugins for Java and other development-oriented tools (such as modeling, database browsing, etc.) are available.

Eclipse stores your projects in a folder called a workspace. You can create multiple workspaces and switch between them however for this course we put all our projects in one workspace. If you have different clients then you may want a workspace for each client. Each workspace could contain multiple projects.

Eclipse lets you develop projects for different languages and tasks. We will be developing Java console applications which run in the terminal or Dynamic Web projects. We will also develop Classes, Servlets, and JUnit test projects within our applications. Eclipse allows you to create lots of different projects.

Each assignment should be its own project. At the end of this course you will have a workspace containing your projects. Avoid the temptation to group all your work into one project. This strategy becomes unmanageable and requires rework.

Downloading Eclipse

Eclipse doesn't come with the JRE (Java Runtime Environment). You probably have Java on your computer already but if not then you should download the latest JRE from Oracle.

After you have downloaded and installed the JRE, you may then download the Eclipse IDE. You'll find the latest version of Eclipse at https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/.